People really do like to think of things in steady-state: in equilibrium already. Factoring in ongoing changes makes situations a lot more complex, as we might recall from school maths. Rates of change and how they change requires calculus; without it, we can just measure and compare directly.
But life is not in equilibrium. We fondly imagine that sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof (Matthew 6:34), but we do tend to overlook the gradual accumulation of bad things and then try to deal with them when they finally spill out.
A bit like a bucket under a leaky pipe, the problem hasn’t appeared when things overflow; the problem is the leak filling that bucket up. Most things in life are gradual, rather than massive changes, and most systems have some capacity to cope with disruption before breaking. When things are volatile and we can’t control the forces pushing us back and forth, we might need to focus on toughness, to avoid breaks. But if we ignore those forces and pretend that breakages just happen, we’re never going to solve the problem properly.
It’s a very simple point to make, but we miss it so much that it’s worth repeating.
1. Physical health
Our bodies can store food in the form of fat (and glycogen and excess amino acids). We break that down between meals. We all know this: it’s an obvious way in which we consume pre-existing capacity. If we don’t replenish that capacity, we starve.
We have less obvious capacities too. We have mental load capacities for worries, stress, decisions, short-term information (like computer RAM) and concentration, to name a few. We have a capacity to take a certain amount of damage and repair it each day, and capacity to continue normal functioning even with greater damage.
These are all natural consequences of the body being a multitude of interlinked, somewhat redundant systems. If one muscle is really tired, others nearby can work a bit harder to do pretty much the same motion.
That tires those auxiliary muscles out even faster. It might wear the joint out with uncushioned impacts or an uncontrolled range of motion. This is how little injuries or errors in technique start off feeling like a little niggle and then suddenly become massive injuries that take a lifetime to heal. It’s frustrating to use low weights that don’t feel tiring: your big muscles can definitely heave more weight around. But you should be limited by your weakest part: can your joints, your bones or your stabilising muscles cope?
i) Working posture
Right now, we should all be thinking about posture from working at home, possibly at kitchen tables hunched over laptops instead of in nice office chairs at desks. The first week might be fine, but you’ll compress nerves, strain muscles or joints and not realise it at first. By the time the nerve is so damaged from being squashed for prolonged times it’ll be too late to correct it easily. If it heals, it’ll take as long again.
ii) obesity
But longer term, we are in an obesity and ageing crisis. We accumulate fat and feel fine, but our arteries are gradually clogging up; our neural pathways are gradually becoming resistant to hormone signals saying we’re well-fed; our happiness pathways are gradually disconnecting from the hormone bath they’re in; and the inflammation is causing more cell and DNA damage.
iii) ageing
That DNA damage is the same as ageing. If we escape cancer we will turn senile and fade away. We only have so much capacity for life and are too interested in fast fashion, nick-nacks and destroying the planet to research how to give ourselves much more. We all read stories about how this or that causes cancer (and frequently it’s a massive stretch of interpretation to reach that conclusion), but what really causes cancer is the gradual accumulation of damage, including from obesity, stress and lack of exercise. I haven’t yet seen a Daily Mail headline telling us all to work 30-hour weeks to cut our stress and avoid cancer, but that might be the healthiest recommendation it could make.
2. The environment
We all know that humanity is ruining the planet. Some greedy psychopaths collude with obstinate morons to pretend that everything is fine, and they even have access to mass media organisations and American presidents, but deep down we all know that that the environment that supports us is suffering.
We used to believe that human activity made no difference. The planet was massive and we were no match for the forces of nature. Australians burned the jungle and killed the animals, turning a tropical continent into mostly desert, with no large animals at all. Mediaeval peoples fished all the large fish away, hunted the largest boar and stags into oblivion, but thought that old tales of massive catches were all exaggeration.
Now we have fished 99% of the fish and we’re scraping the sea bed for remains. We farm most of the fertile land – 24% of all the world’s land - and are clearing the remaining forests for more. Including all uses, humanity uses 72% of the world’s non-ice land.
i) Fertility
Although I said that we use the fertile land, fertility isn’t set in stone; quite the opposite. Fertile land is built up over generations from river floods depositing silt and plants growing, dying and decaying into the soil. Fertility is something stored in land and gradually accumulated, not a fixed trait.
Mediaeval farmers recognised this when they invented crop rotations, swapping high-output plants such as wheat with nitrogen-fixing legumes such as peas that replenished the soil. We make up for our massive overuse of the land by using fertiliser, most of which is made from a finite supply of fossil fuels.
But other industrial farming practices don’t help either. Massive open fields, barren of trees or bushes, allow soil erosion; rain washes the soil away into rivers and the oceans, and wind picks up dry dust and carries it away too. And the topsoil which goes is the most fertile, important soil layer. Ploughing into deeper layers of soil can release some buried fertility, but this can also expose it to further decomposition, releasing the fertility to the air.
When people say that we can produce enough food to support the human population and even to support the anticipated increases in population, one of the massive assumptions in that statement is that current land use is sustainable. We are already turning good farmland into desert, year by year. It’s not an instant change; yields just gradually decrease, more work is needed, more fertiliser and irrigation, until a decade or few later no-one remembers that the land was once good.
ii) Fresh water
We use water for things like drinking and washing, and in a few places there is such a dense human population that this itself is more than the area can provide. There was a recent drought in Johannesburg, I think, and I know that London draws in water from as far as Wales at times.
But the reason we are short of water is farming. We use fresh water to irrigate dry land that couldn’t otherwise bear large crops. This isn’t just the diversion of rivers and disruption of natural ecosystems that depend on annual flooding and big rivers, or the damming of rivers and use of water that other humans downriver relied on, although the arguments over dams and diversions (such as over the Mekong river) show that there isn’t enough to go round.
We are draining freshwater aquifers, underground lakes that have accumulated over millions of years. These are, on human timescales, unreplenishable and irreplaceable. Some lakes are already entirely dry.
The planet lets us use this much fresh water right now, but that’s because we are consuming finite stores, far over the amount generated each year. At some point soon, large regions around the world are going to hit a nasty crunch. It won’t be instant, like your water tap just not working. It’ll be a slow crunch over a year or two as flows gradually decrease to a trickle and it becomes ever more expensive to pump the last few drops. They’ll be disasters nonetheless.
iii) Climate thresholds
Now that we’ve seen some simple, physical examples, I can write about something I find harder to explain as clearly. Our climate is created from a web of interactions, but some things that can have massive effects just haven’t been triggered yet. They only matter when the world passes certain points. Climate scientists write of the methane trapped underwater or in the Siberian permafrost that will be released if things warm up a bit more and which will cause massive further warming.
It’s like starting a fire. The wood has a lot of energy in it, but just sits there idly at normal temperatures. You can freeze it, then warm it day by day and nothing happens. But if for a moment you hit, say, 250 degrees, then it burns. It releases more heat, burning more wood.
We have limits we shouldn’t hit when playing with the planet’s climate; if we do hit them then new, powerful effects will start, and we won’t like what we see.
iv) Ecosystem thresholds
As with the physical environment, there are ways that the web of life can adapt to our interference. If we eat all the fish, nothing will eat baby jellyfish and we will get shoals of jellies in our seas. If we get rid of a pest, its predators will eat something else. Eventually, however, those relationships will become so strained that the ecosystem breaks. If we use insecticides to protect crops across most of the land, there will be less pollination and less food for birds. Populations will thin out, and eventually become too thin to breed and survive; small accidents will have massive effects.
Our oceans, for example, have absorbed a lot of carbon dioxide. They can physically absorb more, but already this is making them too acidic for life. Coral reefs are dying, and with them whole ecosystems that depend on them.
When the usual chains of production and eating that keep animals alive are already stretched to fragility, one more problem can be the straw that breaks the ecosystem’s back. Waste dumped or spilled in a lake or river, that in a pristine world would be insignificant, is immensely destructive in lands already pillaged to within an inch of their life. Suddenly that extra inch really matters!
Even if we believe that we are not consuming too much: that we have judged our consumption perfectly to just keep the world ticking over, additional damage from dumping or accidents would be a massive problem because they would necessarily disrupt the efficient balance we’ve assumed we’ve achieved. If more dumping were possible without side effects, it’d already be allowed.
No-one notices ecosystem degradation immediately, because animals that already live must live out their lives. They might even manage to breed a bit, but not enough to replace the deaths. Decline can be both certain and yet gradual.
3. The economy
The economy is a big subject; it can cover all aspects of how we structure society and interact, as all of these affect or prosperity. Most people agree though that we should aim to live within our means.
i) Economic adaptation
The theory behind a market economy says that they will be efficient when equilibrium. How long does it take to reach equilibrium? What if the world is constantly moving? Can we ever hit that moving target with our current markets? It seems to me that we are constantly lagging behind, and therefore experiencing suboptimal outcomes. For example, if we had the same loudspeaker technology and manufacturing lines for 100 years I would probably learn what balance of price and quality suited me and the market would probably have adjusted to give that as an option, with no extra price. But when one of the things I look for is long-term reliability, it’s impossible for me to find the best product quickly. One might die in a year; another in three years, another after a month but through chance rather than faulty design… it will take me decades to try a variety of options.
The markets we currently have have a limited ability to adapt. When society changes faster, as it necessarily is, markets cannot distribute goods and services as efficiently. If we move really quickly or massively, such as by cutting trade ties with our closest friends or buying all the loo roll because it cures influenza, markets can break down entirely.
We should think of economic adaptation as happening slowly, at the scale of lifetimes, not just days or months.
ii) Pensions
Our pension system is not funded by National Insurance, even though that was introduced to be a special pensions tax. NI was spent as it was received and pensions are paid from current tax revenue. NI takings have been far, far too small to cover the pensions of those now receiving pensions.
Our pension policy is therefore a giant pyramid scheme. Older generations got in first, paid their money and got not only their money back through government expenditure on themselves, but subsequent generations’ money too. The young end up paying to keep promises that the elderly effectively made to themselves before the young were even born, and hoping to take their unborn children’s money in return.
Those elderly who complain about pension reform as being unfair; that they were promised something, and might have planned their lives around it, should remind themselves that there are only two options out of this pickle: to penalise the young, who weren’t even alive when it was created, or to claw back some of the unfair promises from a generation that did at least have decades to vote for a fairer system.
That’s the public pension system, but private pensions are only a little better. Overly generous pensions were offered, and companies are still liable for stupid commitments of final-salary defined benefit schemes that the young can only dream of. In an efficient market, companies burdened by such liabilities would go broke, but even if this did happen, private pensions are all covered by a pension guarantee fund that is paid for from all pension schemes. Thus excessive commitments from some companies can still be covered by young people’s pensions even if they never work at or buy from that company.
Pensions are one way in which it was spotted that the economy can be drained for current benefit. We piled up future commitments, but can’t pile them up forever. They are coming due.
iii) Debt
The most obvious one of all. The word is used to describe all types of lag: a water debt, a carbon debt, etc. Owing stuff is one of the most basic and founding features of society. Once apon a time it was between living adults, season by season. It was associated with moral bankruptcy; to be in debt was a sin, and debtors were close to slaves.
Given the wealth inequalities of the time, that’s a vile doctrine. But perhaps it would do us some good nowadays. Our governments have borrowed over decades to prop up spending, creating national debt that the young and unborn must pay. Original sin eat your heart out! Why bother devising complex theological explanations for why we inherit Adam’s first sin and are therefore awful beings in need of the Church’s control when you can do it all so much more simply? Your parents incurred debt and you need to pay it off. Live in austerity, follow our strict rules and we’ll probably manage to service the interest, ensuring that your children for the rest of time can carry your parents’ original sin.
We sometimes are told that because those borrowings went into the economy to cause growth, and children inherit the economy, they benefit from the borrowing. That assumes that growth is permanent, valuable, evenly distributed across the population, and that debt is under-valued by our efficient markets.
Growth itself might be finite. It certainly is if outputs are linked to inputs. If we say that our efficiency in using inputs to make things increases by a factor of 10, we will still only need a few hundred years before current growth trends will have us using more energy than the entire output of the sun. Growth beyond gradual innovation is a bubble or cannibalisation of other effort.
How much of all that borrowing has been invested in technology and research for the future? How much of the oil? Do future generations benefit if we consume finite resources just to keep a massive population alive today? Do they benefit from plastic bobble-heads, fast fashion and cheap holidays for us today? It’s only the tiny fraction of our economy dedicated to producing new knowledge that is at all beneficial, and we could do the same amount of research with a far smaller economy.
As an example of this point alone, the USSR went to the moon first despite being far poorer than the west. The hardships much of their population went through were inhumane, but we could nowadays keep ourselves well-off and healthy and still funnel a lot more of our ‘investment’ into real value.
I’m digressing a bit here. Yes, the markets determine value through returns, but market failures and reasons not to trust such outcomes are a deep enough topic for an essay themselves. Let’s just accept that debt is indeed something we can’t have too much of before it becomes unsustainable, and that we see its effects some time after it’s first been incurred.
iv) Oil (,coal and natural gas)
Oil is a physical thing, like water, but it’s in the economy section for a reason. It’s the foundation of our prosperity. Oil makes, via fertiliser, much of humanity’s food. Oil makes plastic and hence most of our tat. Oil makes petrol, fuel oil and diesel, providing most of our transport. Oil often comes with natural gas, which accounts for much of our electricity production. We have gradually invented other ways to make electricity, and we can make some fuel or plastics from processing plant oils at the expense of feeding people.
We can’t do any of this for ever. Oil is finite, although it seems that there’s enough of it that we’ll ruin our own lives with climate change before we manage to burn all of it.
4. Productivity
I covered health and even mentioned stress, but I focussed on physical health. We all have a limited capacity for work, but we can push through our body’s boundaries for brief periods of difficulty.
i) Long hours
Research suggests that, on average, people’s productivity per hour drops when they work more than about 30 hours per week. We can still do more in 40 hours, but not the 1/3 more we might expect. Our current stereotypical working week is already more than most of us can most healthily sustain.
Hunter-gatherers, by the way, work much less than we do. One hunt can provide food for many. They lack healthcare and many amenities, but they represent humanity’s most natural state: what we evolved for. It is agriculture that demanded lots of work, and then inequality that cemented it as a way of life for most. Our working week of 40 hours has not emerged through any thought or rational process. It is the result of religions’ demands for a rest day, the gradual invention of a second rest day in which to spend money (when religious demands of the ‘rest’ day were greater), and the demands of family time and commuting on the other days.
We are still pressured by society into working longer and harder, again a deep subject worthy of an essay in itself. 40 hours is a contractual default, but many people spend much more of their lives working and commuting. If one person borrows from his personal future, that becomes the goal to achieve; an expectation we have of each other, oblivious to the consequences. In a competitive world in which coming first matters much more than what is actually achieved, we all have to balance our borrowings from future health and capacity against the demands of today. At first it might be extra work for a busy period for a one-off project or to secure a promotion. But then the projects pile up, the promotions to work for are numerous, and eventually it’s not a way of standing out; it’s just what is required to hold onto a job at all.
Many MBA students and management consultants know perfectly well that long hours are less productive. Yet in some careers 60-hour weeks are common, especially at the start of the career. Recruit bright people and work them to dullness on dull tasks. Test their ability to do menial stuff well, or their resilience to hardship, and the brightest will… emerge unscathed? Or give up in disgust? Long hours benefits those at the top who take a fraction of the profit.
Long hours give companies an immediate benefit, but sacrifice employee loyalty, inventiveness (creativity is the first thing to go; we can maintain productivity for manual or repetitive labour for far more hours a week than for creative labour) and morale. And the most sensible, balanced people will be the most likely to go. That will leave a crowd of deluded, macho, mentally dull obsessives to be promoted. All these indentured servitude schemes (you’ll have a great career if you just do the time now) are borrowings from the future, and long hours is the most basic version. This is probably because so many more people are educated and have high aspirations. Where once only a few had the education to achieve promotion, and most people were simply trained to do a clerking job all their life, now everyone has that education. But the proportion of clerking work to senior, well-paid work hasn’t changed. So now everyone does the clerking work and we select people for senior roles using, in order, luck, privilege and willingness to sacrifice, rather than privilege and then merit, as was once the case.
The difference being that the clerking work is now paid less, definitely less per hour, because it’s balanced against the future pay of a senior role. A future role that may never come.
ii) Sleep deprivation
This drains us. What we can do for one day, when entirely fresh, rapidly has a big effect on us if we try to maintain it. Most people find time by sleeping less, but we have very limited capacity to endure sleep deprivation. Our abilities drop with just a few hours of sleep deficit, easily achievable in just a few days of a hectic working life. Most importantly, we become accustomed to this new state so fast that we are not directly aware of being sleep deprived. This sleep debt doesn’t work on the timescales of years; it’s a matter of days, if not hours.
What does work over longer timescales are the accumulating mental health disorders that are caused by a stressful life. We might think of such illness as rolling a die: on a 1 you get ill, and if you live a stressful life, it’s a 1 or a 2. There’s a bit of truth to that, but these are also cumulative.
Small problems that you can’t deal with never go away, until you have a host of worries. Small things you missed, disappointments and let-downs, wear away your self-esteem and create memories of who you are and what you’ve done that are more unpleasant than pleasant.
We might have only a limited amount of concentration and self-control (self control is like a muscle: you get more the more you use it, but on any one day you might well have a limited capacity). Spend it all at work and you might blow a fuse with the people you love, or just make a mistake and ruin the evening dinner.
iii) attention
The internet and modern advertising have turned our attention into a resource to be mined. Everyone wants to distract and divert us: to plant a seed of loyalty or longing in our fertile minds so that we will want their product a bit more, or want their political goals a bit more. Those constant distractions, for many people, are borrowings from the future. In this case, however, it is our future goals and dreams. We tell ourselves we will pursue the desires we already have tomorrow; today, we will let these distractions be our desires. And yet every day there are new distractions creating new desires for us.
There’s always tomorrow. Until there isn’t. One day ten years have slipped behind you and you missed the starting gun on life. Did you do it to yourself? Yes, partly. But society helped you; we, as society, create the slide to slip down and the rocky staircase to climb up for other life goals. How much blame should we give to people who slip and how much to ourselves for making slips so easy?
Having a long attention span isn’t something that disappears all at once. An individual moment of entertainment won’t change who you are. But a year? That’s probably enough that your brain has already changed, as we can read from opinion pieces all over the place. You’ve lost the ability to do anything else; you’re broken but it wasn’t one thing that broke you.
5. Happiness
What makes us happy? As far as utilitarian philosophy is concerned, and therefore our economic models, there is one happiness and it’s all the same. Different experiences have different levels of happiness, and all can be valued in one measure, i.e. currency. Human happiness is complex; we balance it with pain, which isn’t necessarily just the other end of the scale. It’s different, and the two can occur together. That doesn’t mean we can’t give all these different combinations of pleasure and pain one monetary value each, but it does make the conversion more complex.
There are also different types of pleasure. There’s the direct physical sensation of sex, food, drink and art. There’s also the peak of Maslow’s pyramid, self-actualisation; the contentment of being who you want to be. And between the two, a different sort of contentment, that comes from a wide range of achievements, such as finishing a long project, having helped someone, having friends and family, being understood and valued and so on.
To achieve all these things requires patience; you help a friend or a stranger not because of the direct physical pleasure that helping them provides, but because of who you are; and you feel a permanent happiness or contentment from being a good person who helps others, and perhaps a permanent happiness from having that friend as a friend.
It is this long-lasting contentment that takes time and effort to build, for no immediate gain. Once achieved, it is permanent; it is a state of being, not a stimulus with one direct cause, and you benefit from it for free. In contrast, direct pleasures that our society is set up to offer become less valuable over time. The little dopamine hit from reading an opinion that agrees with you, or from seeing a cute animal, or from feeling like you have a great life because you bought a product that people with great lives buy, becomes harder and harder to replicate. You become dependent on those stimuli for your steady-state of happiness; with enough pleasure rushing around your head from direct causes, your brain doesn’t have to bother making its own, and being an efficient and sensible organ, it stops wasting its effort.
Then you need the immediate pleasures of the world and you can never reach the balanced state of being in which you have time to invest in long-term meaning.
Happiness is itself an investment. The first few times you invest in being a better person, or in an achievement, nothing will happen. There is a lag in the effect; one action doesn’t change who you are, and only the most optimistic or delusional (same thing) of people will have a changed self-image.
The opposite is also true; one moment of weakness is just that. But over time the moments build up until you can’t delude yourself any more; you’re not the person you wanted to be.
Our whole society is set up in a way that does not value these investments in happiness. That seems a cynical statement; on its own, many people would take it as part of a conspiracy theory more than sober analysis. I hope we’ve already seen it justified here, but it’s also worth clarifying; we do not pay for, or sell, friendship. There are no jobs relating to becoming a more virtuous person; the things I have mentioned as contributing to contentment do not count towards GDP. In contrast, short-term impetuosity is advertised for, bought and sold.
6. Risk management
This is not so much an entirely separate category as another way of describing everything already covered. Having been a risk manager in a previous job, with half my time devoted to tracking the company’s risks and forcing teams to address them, I know that people rarely bother looking ahead at problems that have not yet occurred. There are typically enough problems to deal with right now; and if there are not, it’s likely that a round of redundancies will be coming because executives will seize the chance of cost savings now.
This is built into our competitive system: if you don’t make the best offer right now, you will go bankrupt. Planning for the future is a cost; and extra costs reduce profitability. A competitor which doesn’t bother will take all the customers, and, nowadays, all the investors too, who typically aren’t familiar enough with how a company is managed to know which one is planning ahead effectively and which isn’t.
The consequences of bad risk management are widespread. From dam collapses and insufficient stockpiled protective health equipment through to the London Whale and banking collapses, we have all lived through them and been affected by them.
As we’ve covered these disparate subjects, we’ve touched on how or attention span is dwindling; the internet, text messaging and advertising encourage us to want immediate payoff for whatever content we are consuming. I’ve mentioned addiction and noted the similarity between known addictions, such as to drugs, and our broader lifestyles. We are more than ‘nudged’ (as modern behaviourist politicos term it) away from what is best, and those habits detract from our lives in a vast array of things.
My mother had a giant repertoire of phrases and sayings, one of which was ‘patience is a virtue’. Perhaps Cato the Elder was right after all; it is the most important virtue, because without the patience to pursue long-term rewards and contentment - without the self control over our own impetuosity - we can never work to make ourselves better people in any other way.
